Page 93 of The Jasad Crown
“Tombs below, that tongue of yours has only grown longer,” Raya huffed. “You think you have the world figured out now because someone gave you a royal title and a shiny bit of jewelry? A crown can sit on an empty head just as easily as any other, girl.”
I blinked, finally glancing at Raya. She arched her stubbed brows into a disapproving slant.
“I didn’t even get the jewelry,” I said. “You are speaking to the first ever crownless Queen.”
We stared at each other for a long minute.
I laughed first, and then Raya was slinging her arm over myshoulders and tucking me against her side. I curled against her, laughing so hard that it took me a while to realize I was also sobbing, and even longer to figure out I wasn’t laughing at all.
Raya rocked me like I was one of the new orphans rescued to the keep, weeping uncontrollably at the memory of a life lost.
“I don’t want to die.”
The arm around me tightened. “You will not die, Sylvia.”
“I am not Sylvia.” I wanted to be. I wanted to be her so badly.
“Be Essiya with your Jasadis, be powerful and fearless for them. Tonight you are Sylvia, and you are home, and you are allowed to be afraid.”
Raya didn’t understand.
If Queen Hanan does not reinstate me as her Heir, I will have to raise the fortress.
If I raise the fortress, I will either burn alive or the magic will consume me. Should it be the latter, I will go mad, and every Jasadi who rallied behind me will be trapped behind the fortress with a mad Malika.
My magic has its own memory that I do not understand.
What if Arin was right about magic-madness?
“When I was seventeen, I begged my mother to let me marry the butcher’s boy,” Raya said suddenly. She stretched her slippers toward the hearth, and I lifted my head from her damp shoulder to peer up at her. As far as any of us knew, Raya had never taken a husband. “I had already made a name for myself as the best seamstress in our village, and I did not see the need to wait around for a wealthier suitor when I pocketed more coin than most of the men around me. I wanted to marry for love, and I loved Baheeg. He was… sweet, you understand, in a way boys as big and strong as him rarely are. He would talk about helping me open my own store, how I could work next door to him after he inherited the shop from his father. Finally, when it became clear to everyone in our village where my heart lay, my mother relented. She said I could marry Baheeg, but never tocome crying to her if the ring on his finger changed him from a man to a beast.”
Riveted, I watched the fire with her, as though the rest of the tale might manifest in the flames. “Did it?”
“I don’t know. I never married him. A week before we were set to be joined as man and wife, I went to deliver a gown to one of my patrons and found her house empty. Clothes gone, furniture stripped, kitchen bare. The only thing left was a bundle on the carpet, shaking its tiny fists and bellowing red murder.”
“She abandoned her baby?” Though I hadn’t imagined every single girl in the keep had wound up here by having a set of dead parents, it still shocked me to think of someone willingly casting aside their child, let alone an infant.
Raya hummed. “Happened all the time, and not just in our parts. Pregnant girls come into a village, make up a tale about a dead husband, and stay long enough to dispose of the infant before they go back to wherever they came from. Sad state of it, really. Anyway, I took the child home—what else could I do? Leave it for the vagrants? Baheeg and my mother were furious, trying to force me to give her up to the Omalian patrol, but I refused. I liked the squalling, red-faced little thing. I would have a home and food to eat soon enough, why shouldn’t I share it with this child? When it became clear I wouldn’t be parted from her, Baheeg ended our engagement and told me to enjoy life as a spinster. No man would come near a woman ‘loaded with the cast-off spawn of whores.’”
“I hope you told him you wouldn’t spit on his face if he was on fire,” I said emphatically.
“I didn’t have your way with words.” She chuckled. “That’s the problem when you’re young. Sometimes you mistake stupid for sweet.”
“What happened to the baby?”
“Ah, she was the light of my life. I would wear dresses to the shopso I could bundle her on my lap while I worked. When she was three, I took her to her first Alcalah festival.” Raya rubbed my arm absently. “The sickness came out of nowhere. One day she was writing out her letters on the kitchen table, and the next I was laying her to rest beside my mother.”
My heart squeezed. “Oh, Raya—”
“It was a long time ago,” Raya said. “I left our village and came to Mahair, and I opened the keep. I made raising you girls my life’s work, and it is the best life I could have asked for. Could I have been happy with Baheeg and the life we imagined for ourselves? Maybe. Maybe. But I will never know. Life does not allow you opportunities to travel down every path, to see the outcome of every choice. You can spend your entire existence frozen in one spot, squinting into the future, or you can decide to move. Pick a path and never look back.”
I wiped my dripping nose. “What if I know where every path leads?”
“Are you a prophet, girl?”
“No, but—”
“Then all you have are suspicions and worries, just like everyone else.”
